Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Google Search Appliance Product Manager

In the last tech tip we talked about how the inmeta operator can be used to do sophisticated queries leveraging the metadata associated with your documents. What if your needs are more complex? You not only want to do queries based on specific meta tag values but also need to provide price range searches on your e-commerce site or date range searches inside your document management system. Luckily we added few interesting operators in the recent release of the Google Search Appliance and they will play nicely with the inmeta operator.

We added new operators for doing number (including price) and date range searches. For number range searches, just add two numbers, separated by two periods, with no spaces, into the search box along with your search terms. For date range searches, use the daterange operator. Let's take a look at some common examples and see these operators in action.

An e-commerce site sells electronics and apparel goods and wants to make it easier for it's customers to search products by keywords and also restrict the searches by price range and other numeric meta tags. For example to express a query that searches for rain jacket in the price range of $100 to $500 one would enter a query like:

rain jacket inmeta:retailprice:$100..$500

You can also express a query that searches flat panel TV between 30 to 50 inches; one would enter a query like:

flat panel TV inmeta:size:30..50

In case of enterprise search, a search-user may be interested in the documents within an ECM system like Documentum or Livelink that provide information about "marketing plan" but restrict to only those documents that were published between Jan 1 2006 to Nov 27 2006. To express such a query one would simply enter a query like:

marketing plan inmeta:publishdate:daterange:2006-01-01..2006-11-27.

I have also seen e-commerce sites that use the Google Search Appliance to power their search, implement a simple search front-end that has a search box and a price slider along with it. Search-users enter the keyword in the search box and pick the appropriate price or number range using the UI widget. The search front-end in turn converts that request to the appropriate search syntax described in the above examples. This way the search-user not only has the power to express complex searches but she also doesn't need to familiarize herself with the additional syntax.

These range-based operators are more examples of how you can provide the power and precision of Google search with the flexibility and customization that your business requires.

Posted by James Wang, Google Mini Team

Here they are, the first 3 Google Enterprise Search Superstars. This award recognizes companies, and the individuals involved, with innovative enterprise search implementations.

Titans of industry? Men among men? Juggernauts of their respective fields? You be the judge. We hope you enjoy their stories and glean a few things you can do to make your users, whether employees or customers, happier and more effective in finding what they are looking for.

Looking to get ideas about how to create search functionality that can recommend experts within your company about a topic? Learn more about this in Danny Perri's "Expert Search" implementation.

Do you have an international audience and want to get some ideas on how to improve your search and service? Read and hear how Chris Hall improved his site.

Would you like to learn more about turning your support site into a more self service portal and increasing the efficiency of support staff? Read and hear more about this from Razi Mohiuddin's story of improving the customer service experience.

If you own a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance, then here's your chance at Search Superstardom. Come share your story with us so we can share it with the world.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Google Search Appliance

There was talk in the Google Search Appliance group this week about the new inmeta query operator; I thought it's time to introduce this new feature to a wider audience.

In a recent release of the Google Search Appliance we added the inmeta query operator allowing search-users to easily create more advanced queries based on meta tag values. The appliance has had this capability for a long time using the requiredfields and partialfields parameters as part of the search API protocol. The inmeta operator allows search users to issue partialfields and requiredfields type searches directly from the search box (in the q= parameter).

The syntax is pretty simple:

inmeta:{meta_tag}
inmeta:{meta_tag}~{meta_tag_value}
inmeta:{meta_tag}={meta_tag_value}

The first query syntax shows how to issue a requiredfields search, which will restrict the results to any containing the meta tag specified. The second will execute a partialfields search with a value, matching any results that have that meta tag with a value matching some or all of the value specified in the query. The third is how to issue a requiredfields search matching the exact value specified in {meta_tag_value}.

For example, if you had content source with all documents having meta tag author and each document having a different value for author meta tag such as john, rajesh, mike, etc. A search-user may be interested in the documents that provide information about "Q3 Revenue" but restrict to only those documents that were authored by John, as John the CFO of the organization. To express such a query she would simply enter a query like:

Q3 revenue inmeta:author=john

Now, if you didn't know that the data was well formatted, and some might have John's full name (John Smith), and some might have his email address (john@acme.com) then you would want to use the following syntax:

Q3 revenue inmeta:author~john

As you see from the above examples, it is very easy to express your queries and perform advanced, sophisticated searches across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We welcome the new inmeta operator to the search town!

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Enterprise Team

Bom dia! A couple months ago we promised to enable more and more customers around the world to benefit from our enterprise search technologies.

Today we’re delivering another piece of that promise – and a big piece for that matter! We just launched Google Enterprise and announced immediate availability of our enterprise search products in Brazil. It was great to see the interest from customers and the press community alike.

For this launch we partnered with MUDE, BearingPoint, B2Bis, Added and Datacraft – great companies with lots of knowledge of the local market and customers. We’re very excited to have them on board helping customers with their enterprise search needs.

Now, if only the Google Search Appliance could help me find an excuse to make it to Rio around Carnival time… :)

Rodrigo Vaca

Posted by Kevin Smith, Partner Program Manager

Need to extend the reach of your Google Search Appliance to even more systems? Want professional services for your Google enterprise products? Just curious about what our Google Enterprise Professional partners are up to?

Look no further. We're happy to announce the launch of our partner webinar series, with demos, updates, and other information from a variety of our technology and consulting partners. You can find the schedule plus register for individual webinars by pointing your browser to:
www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/live_demos.html

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

British Airways, the UK's largest international airline, has deployed two Google Search Appliances to help its 48,000 employees find information inside the company. With employees traveling all over the world and working all hours of the day, it is essential for BA to provide always on access to information on their internal network with Google.

And the employees like it. Accoring to Alan Huish BA's employee self-service programme manager, employee self-service satisfaction has risen from 60% to 78% since Google was deployed, and efficiency has improved because information is more readily available. With Google, BA has upgraded search to first class!

Posted by Kevin Gough, Product Marketing Manager

Interested in getting a sneak peak at the latest Google Enterprise products? Want to verify that Google is run by humans and not just really smart robots? Join us in November for a breakfast seminar during our Google Enterprise world tour, where our Enterprise execs will share their thoughts on IT trends and you can learn about Google's enterprise search, geospatial and collaboration offerings first hand from product experts.

We'll be stopping by the following U.S. cities: Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose and Austin. Learn more and register to attend.

We'll be in the following European cities: London, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris. Learn more and sign up.

Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google Enterprise

We think Jotspot is a hotspot for enterprise.

In the last couple years, JotSpot made a name for itself, as well as for do-it-yourself application publishing -- used by individuals and businesses. JotSpot makes it easy for companies of all sizes to use wikis to collaborate online.

We're excited about what that could mean for our enterprise customers. So, welcome Joe and team.

We look forward to putting those wikis to work.

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

We will be hosting a joint webinar with Persistent Systems this Thursday 11/2 at 11:00am PST where they will be demonstrating some of the ways in which they extend the reach of the Google Search Appliance through their Suite of Enterprise Content Connectors. As a Google Enterprise Professional partner, Persistent has spent the past year providing value to our customers by extending the Google Search Appliance deep into enterprise content repositories.

This webinar, jointly hosted by our Google Search Appliance Product Manager Nitin Mangtani, will provide demonstration of end-to-end search scenarios on hidden secure content residing within Lotus Notes and Documentum eRoom. Sign up for it at http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/live_demos.html.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Enterprise Search

The Google Search Appliance can automatically expand a search-users query by adding synonyms and words with the same stem. For example if a user enters car then search appliance will automatically search for car or cars. Administrators also have ability to custom upload their synonyms file or blacklist certain terms. So if you have a product which was originally called "product abc" and is now called "product xyz" you can create a synonyms file with these terms, as a result any searches for keyword "product abc" will automatically return relevant documents that contain the terms "product abc" or "product xyz". The end-result of query expansion is that search users find richer set of relevant results without having to re-query with different combination of terms.

You can log-in to the administrative console of Google Search Appliance and enable the Query Expansion feature. We provide you with 4 flexible options and these are:
None - This is by default and it disables the query expansion feature completely.
Standard: Enables query expansion, using Google's built-in synonyms.
Local: Enables query expansion, using only the synonyms that you upload to the appliance.
Full: Enables query expansion, using both Google's built-in synonyms and the files that you upload to the appliance.

Here is the example of the custom synonyms file uploaded to search appliance.
#Synonyms file created Oct 2006
#Author: nitinm
product abc = product xyz
FED = federal electronics division
{phone, cell, mobile, telephone}

There are two formats we support for the synonyms file
Format 1: term1 operator term2
In this format:
• term1 consists of one word or multiple words that are separated by single spaces.
• term2 consists of one word or multiple words that are separated by single spaces.
• operator is one of the following:
= Specifies that the words are equivalent. The appliance expands a search query for term1 or term2 by adding the other term.
> Causes the appliance to add term2 when a search query contains term1.

Entry format 2: {term, term, ...}
In this format:
• Each term in the list will be used to expand queries for each other term.
• The use of brackets {} was introduced with the current release

And finally you can create the blacklists file to mark certain words that should not be expanded. The blacklists file is applicable to both Google built-in synonyms and your custom synonyms file.

As you could see from the examples, we provide you a flexible way to create the synonyms file and also let you choose the policies that are applicable to your environment. The Google built-in synonyms file is also very rich and should be enabled. We recommend using the Full option to enable both Google built-in synonym file and your custom synonym file. So besides uploading / enabling new query expansion files, don't forget to enable it in your front end via the admin console.

We look forward to seeing happier search users.